Dementia Care in Canaan, CT
Specialized in-home support for seniors with dementia, Alzheimer's, and memory loss.
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
You noticed it a few months ago, maybe longer. Your parent got confused on the way back from the Canaan post office, a route they’d driven for forty years. You told yourself it was a bad day. Then it kept happening, and now you’re trying to figure out what comes next without any clear map. That feeling, of watching someone you know deeply start to slip away in small moments, is what brings most families to us.
We’re Private Duty Aides, a nurse-founded home care agency serving families across Litchfield County. We provide private-pay, non-medical dementia care at home, meaning a trained caregiver who shows up consistently, keeps the routine steady, and helps your parent stay safe in the place they know best. You don’t have to sort through a hospital intake system or a long waiting list. You just call us.
Dementia care at home is about structure and presence. A good caregiver shows up at the same time each day, follows the same morning sequence, uses familiar phrases, and keeps the environment calm. For someone with memory loss, predictability is steadying. When that predictability disappears, everything gets harder, confusion rises, wandering risk goes up, and the nights get longer for everyone.
Day to day, our caregivers help with personal care like bathing, dressing, and grooming. They prepare meals, manage medication reminders, provide gentle redirection when confusion sets in, and offer the kind of patient companionship that keeps your parent engaged rather than withdrawn. For families in Canaan who’ve had a parent come home from Sharon Hospital after a fall or medical event, we can step in immediately to fill the gap between discharge and whatever longer-term plan is being built. We know the questions that come up at that point, and we help families think through them.
Because we’re nurse-founded, every care plan for dementia starts with a real clinical understanding of how memory loss progresses. That means the caregiver we match to your family isn’t just kind, though they are. They also know what to watch for, how to communicate with someone in cognitive decline, and when to flag something for you or a medical provider.
Nurse-founded, with memory care in mind.
Our agency was founded by a working nurse who watched families dealing with memory loss navigate systems that weren’t built for them. The way we train, match, and brief caregivers reflects what that experience taught her.
Caregivers selected specifically for dementia work.
We don’t assign whoever’s available. For dementia care, we look for specific temperament, communication skills, and experience. Your parent’s caregiver will have worked with memory loss before, and we’ll brief them on your parent before the first visit.
We answer when you call.
Dementia doesn’t keep business hours, and neither do we. When something changes at 8pm on a Tuesday, you can reach us. We don’t route you through an answering service that leaves you waiting until morning.
We know Canaan and Litchfield County.
We understand the discharge process at Sharon Hospital, the geography of the area, and the particular situation of families in a rural county where resources aren’t always close. We work with what’s actually here.
How it works
You tell us what’s going on. No intake forms, no pressure. We just listen, ask a few questions, and get a real picture of what your parent needs and what your family is managing.
Dementia requires a particular kind of person. Patient, steady, experienced with redirection and routine. We don’t match based on availability alone. We match based on fit for this kind of care and for your parent’s personality.
For Canaan families coming out of a hospital discharge or a sudden change in condition, we move quickly. Same-day starts happen when the situation calls for it.
You’re not handed off and forgotten. We check in regularly, you can reach us when something changes, and we adjust care as your parent’s needs shift over time.
Why families choose us
Every aide is trained and supervised through an RN’s lens — not just placed and forgotten.
Personality fit matters more than skill on paper. We match for temperament, pace, and patience.
No franchise rotation. You work with the people who run this agency — direct, accessible, accountable.
Most families are matched with a caregiver within 24 to 48 hours. When something shifts at home, we move quickly.
We build a daily structure around your parent’s rhythm — meals, walks, evenings — and protect it.
You hear from us, not just the aide. Updates on appetite, sleep, mood, mobility — the things that matter.
Every caregiver clears a multi-step screening — background check, reference checks, and an in-person interview with our RN founder — before they're ever placed in a home.
Why families trust us
Private Duty Aides is nurse-founded. Every caregiver clears a multi-step screening — a background check, reference checks, and an in-person interview with our RN founder — before they are ever placed in a home. You get the same consistent caregiver, matched by a nurse, not whoever happens to be available.
Common questions
A typical day starts with a consistent morning routine: helping your parent get up, washed, dressed, and fed in the same order, at roughly the same time. From there, the caregiver provides companionship and gentle activity, manages medication reminders, prepares meals, and handles light tasks around the home. If your parent becomes confused or agitated, the caregiver uses calm redirection rather than correction, which reduces distress significantly. The afternoon and evening follow a similar structure, because predictability is one of the most stabilizing things we can offer someone with memory loss.
We can often start care the same day a family reaches us, including after a Sharon Hospital discharge. The transition home is one of the highest-risk periods for someone with dementia, and we know that gaps in coverage during that window cause real problems. Call us as soon as you know a discharge is coming, and we'll have a caregiver in place before your parent walks through the front door.
Our services are private pay, meaning families pay directly rather than through Medicare or standard health insurance. Medicare covers skilled nursing and therapy visits under specific conditions, but it doesn't cover the kind of ongoing daily home care we provide. Long-term care insurance policies sometimes do cover non-medical home care, so if your parent has one, it's worth checking the policy details. We're glad to help you think through what to ask.
A home health aide typically works under a medical order, visits for a limited number of hours, and focuses on specific skilled tasks. Our dementia caregivers provide non-medical support, which means they're there for the daily living piece: routine, safety, companionship, personal care, and engagement. The two can work alongside each other, and often do. Where a home health aide visits a few times a week, our caregiver provides the consistent daily presence that keeps your parent steady in between.
Yes, and for dementia care we treat this seriously rather than as a nice-to-have. We ask about your parent's history, temperament, what they respond to, what agitates them, and what they used to care about. That information shapes who we match them with. The goal is a caregiver your parent comes to recognize and feel comfortable around, which takes time but starts with the right fit from the beginning.
We keep your parent's care going without interruption. If your regular caregiver is sick or unavailable, we have a backup in place before you need to worry about it. For dementia care specifically, we try to use the same small pool of caregivers so your parent isn't suddenly facing a stranger. Consistency matters too much to leave that to chance, and we build our coverage with that in mind.
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Dementia Care near Canaan
No sales pressure. We'll tell you straight if we're not a fit.
Private Duty Aides — Canaan, CT
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